I believe (please correct me if I'm wrong) Goody started in the Puritan tradition of naming children after virtues and biblical names/words. Names like Faith, Grace, Prudence, and Goody were used for both genders.
In the movie, The Passion of Darkly Noon, the title character says that his parents (who belong to a religious cult that allegedly derives from the Puritans) picked a word randomly from the Bible and that became his name.
I found this on ancestry.com:
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~clifflamere/Aid/AID-PuritanNaming.htm
"It's the job that is never started that takes the longest to finish." - J.R.R. Tolkien
http://babynames.com/namelist/9415432